Florida Legislators Challenge University's Domestic Partner Benefits Plan
by Jim Brown
February 14, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A Florida lawmaker is calling on the University of Florida to cease offering same-sex domestic partner health-care benefits. Recently, UF became the only university in the state to approve a health benefits plan for the partners of both unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples.
State Representative Dennis Baxley, a Republican from Ocala, feels the school's policy assaults traditional marriage and needs to be amended. He says state tax dollars should not be used to support a deadly lifestyle; nor should state-funded institutions enact policies that encourage it.
"Without a doubt," Baxley asserts, "our universities have become a key stronghold in the battle for the culture, where there are those who are wanting to do everything they can to normalize these kind of relationships in the eyes of others." These proponents of homosexual culture, he contends, "are actively recruiting people of that lifestyle and wanting to make them welcome."
The Florida lawmaker feels some members of the State Legislature are not voicing enough outrage over the UF domestic partner benefits policy. "The problem is that we're losing this discussion," he says, "particularly with younger people in urban areas."
And the reason pro-family voices are losing the "homosexual rights" debate, Baxley contends, is because young people and others in the mainstream public "really don't understand what's at risk when you redefine a basic social institution such as marriage and the family." He hopes to rally other conservative leaders to speak out and make the risks of such redefinition clear.
Baxley and ten other co-sponsors have filed a bill in the Florida legislature that would prohibit UF from offering benefits for the domestic partners of unmarried homosexual employees.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
